Adventures of Miss 101
by waiting4morning
Summary: All she wants to do is find her Dad and make things the way they used to be. Short one-shots from the main quest of Fallout 3. Spoilers. Female Lone Wanderer. No pairings.
1. Chapter 1

_Female/Caucasian Lone Wanderer. I've tried to keep free of too many descriptors so that you can imagine your own character, but I did use a first name. Also, Bethesda Softworks owns _Fallout 3_. Minor spoilers for the main quest in this particular snippet._

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Nina breathed heavily through her mouth, the edges of the hockey mask whistling as her breath passed through it. She hated the mask—it stank like sweat, cigarette smoke, and other bodily unmentionables from the raider whose corpse she'd taken it from. But it was the only thing protecting her head at the moment since a raider's swing at her head put a crack in her combat helmet that not even Moira at Craterside Supply could repair. But the hockey mask had one thing in its favor: it had just saved her face from another scar and possibly tetanus poisoning.

Kicking the nailboard aside, Nina pointed her assault rifle at the super mutant's body, but glancing up at the bloody stump that used to be a head reassured her. This one wasn't going to cause her any more problems. She allowed herself to relax a fraction and took the opportunity to jam a stimpack into her leg. She'd been stupid enough to step on a nest of radroaches as she scuttled among the rubble surrounding the Jefferson Memorial, and the hard-shelled terrors had bit her leg in a dozen places before she could whack them all.

Nina walked off the initial buzz of the stimpack racing through her veins by finally entering the sub-basement of the Memorial—the door she'd been aiming for when the super mutant came at her from behind. Dr. Li had mentioned that this was the hub of the original Project Purity team. If Dad was going to be anywhere, he would be here—perhaps hiding away from the super mutants. _Or...,_ the thought teased out of the increasingly morbid side of her mind, _or_ _he could be in a super mutant stomach already_.

No! She would not allow herself to think that. Dad was alive. He had to be. Her palms sweaty, Nina gripped the warn stock of her rifle more securely and double-checked the display of her Pip Boy: no one within range. That buoyed her steps; perhaps the mutants hadn't made it down this direction. After all, the lure of nearby Rivet City and its numerous denizens probably kept the abandoned Memorial of secondary importance.

Nina passed a door and palmed the release, stepping back automatically against the surrounding wall in case any stealthed enemies came roaring out. Feral ghouls, for one, loved to do that. She wasn't sure if it was some by-product of their mutation or perhaps some other animal deviousness, but ferals snuck up on her more easily than she was comfortable with. Her back was still smarting from a lash she'd received while traveling down the metro subway on the way here.

No enemies screeched out, so she ducked her head around the corner and walked in. The room appeared to be set up as a small clinic. A medical table still had a scalpel, bone saw, and some surgical tubing on it. Not much else in the room worth looking at. She was tucking the tubing away into her pack when something Dr. Li had said came to mind: Nina had not been born in Vault 101. She'd been born in the midst of her father's work with Project Purity... which meant that she had probably been born in this very room.

Looking around with renewed interest, Nina no longer wondered that her mother had died—as Dr. Li said—of "complications." Having grown up around her father's clinic in the Vault where he never skipped routine maintenance and sanitation procedures, Nina could see the wear and tear on the various machines. Even discounting the exposed wires that looked like a mole rat had chewed through, everything looked like it had taken a beating. She felt a flash of irrational anger: What had her parents been thinking bringing a child into the world with such sub-standard equipment?

But Dr. Li again came to mind: her mother had looked forward to meeting her. They wanted her; Nina. She touched the moth-eaten fabric on the gurney sadly and turned away.

She crept down the corridor, finding a few scattered remnants of a life interrupted; a baseball and well-worn glove, coffee mugs sitting on a scarred table—one with dried out dregs still sitting in the bottom—papers full of calculations scattered across a desk. Nothing here looked recently lived in. Her hope steadily dwindling, Nina went to the last door and opened it. Air rushed out and with it, a familiar scent of aftershave and plain soap.

"Dad!" Nina jumped through the door, but like all the other rooms, it was empty. He had certainly been there—the bed linens were rumpled, and the dust on the desk had been disturbed—but her father was nowhere in sight. Staggering to the desk, she sank down onto the chair, head in her hands. Now what? What should she do—? She could feel an unfamiliar panic bubbling up inside her, knifing up the back of her throat—

Her elbow brushed something. Removing the heels of her hands from her eyes, Nina brushed aside some papers full of her father's indecipherable handwriting to see a couple of holotapes, dated some years back. Her Pip Boy accepted the inserted tapes and after a few warbles, her father's voice floated out into the empty room.

"_I am at a loss. My beloved wife is gone. In her place is my daughter, small and helpless…"_

"Dad…" she whispered, throat tight.

An unconscious impulse sent her under the desk, curling her legs up against her chest, her spare .32 pistol digging into her spine, and her Pip Boy volume as high as it would go. She used to do this all the time in the Vault when she was little—Dad would be sitting at the desk, working on something, or talking to Jonas, and Nina would be content to sit at his feet, playing with a battered toy car.

As she listened on, playing and replaying the tape, tears prickled in the corners of her eyes. It had been so long… she hadn't cried since Dad had removed cleaned a nasty radroach bite on her hand what seemed like years ago, but was in reality only a few months. Everything had happened so quickly—Dad leaving, herself stumbling around the Wasteland armed with nothing but a baseball bat and her frazzled wits. Between avoiding raiders and trying to earn enough caps to upgrade her weapons so that she could move more safely through the Wasteland in search of her father, she hadn't had time to cry. But now, she felt the hot tears race down her face as if she'd been building up a reservoir of them for the past six months.

"…_It breaks my heart to go, but I must put the needs of my child before my own."_

"Not this time, Dad," she whispered to the empty room, "I will find you. I promise."

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Author's note: this is just a random one-shot that popped into my mind after playing this particular part in the game. I don't think I have a continuous story in mind, but I think maybe a few other short stories might emerge. Who knows? If they do, I'll post them here.


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: this obviously takes place much later in the main quest. Beware spoilers!_

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"What is he doing?" Nina gripped the stock of her assault rifle, but its familiar, worn grip did not comfort her. A few, frustrating feet away, her father was talking with some guy in a trench coat. Dad looked calm, as he always did, but the stranger was caressing the hilt of a pistol at his hip. And those two armored guards…

She turned to Dr. Li, whose face looked pale and pinched. "What is he doing?" the younger woman repeated. " Open the glass shield!"

"I… I can't," the older woman stared through the glass as if to bore a hole with her eyes. "He's locked it from the inside." She looked up, saw Nina handling her gun and added, "It's bullet-proof glass. It was designed that way incase Raiders or super mutants ever got inside the Memorial; we could barricade ourselves against attack."

"This place is not safe," Charon said behind them. He was eyeing the two armored guards with his usual impassivity, though he too kept his shotgun close at hand.

"We're staying here until my dad comes out," Nina reminded him sharply.

"Very well."

"Who are they anyway? What do they want?" Nina turned back to the Rivet City scientist with impatience. She could barely hear her father's voice over the hum of machinery and the panicked thudding of her own heart.

"Enclave," Dr. Li whispered. "How in the world did they know about this place?" she said, almost to herself and then, to Nina, "What do they want? Isn't it obvious? With access to an unlimited supply of purified water, their so-called president wouldn't have to even use force to take over the country: people would beg to follow him."

"What country?" Nina snapped, fear for her father making her irritable. "Has this 'President' looked out the window lately? He'd be president of Yao Guai and mole rats!"

"I don't know!" Dr. Li snapped back, her graying hair glinting in the dim yellow light that filtered through the Rotunda. "People that want power bad enough will do anything to get it and keep—James!"

Nina whirled to the window. The stranger had taken out the pistol and was pointing it at her father's head. She leapt to the glass, pounding her fists against it.

"Dad, no!"

His eyes glanced up for the merest moment to meet hers; they crinkled at the corners like when he was getting ready to smile. Then his fingers moved quickly over some controls that she couldn't see well, and the stranger and his two armored guards staggered.

Her father stumbled over to the glass door where Nina watched in horror as his eyes went glassy.

"Run!" he mouthed. "I love you. Run! Get out of here!"

In the distance she heard her Pip Boy's Geiger counter tick get louder and faster. Somehow, Three Dog's drawling voice erupted in her memory. "_Tick, tick, tickety, means run your ass out of there…"_

"Dad!" the scream ripped from her throat, but her father was slumping to the ground and someone was still screaming.

Someone slapped her. Nina blinked dazedly to see Charon's stoic features above her and his hand hanging limply at his side.

"This place is not safe," he said again as Dr. Li shoved past him.

"We have to get out of here. More Enclave are coming, and my team and I have no fighting experience. Can you move?"

Fight? Enclave? Dad—

"But, Dad—"

"He's dead. There's enough radiation in there to level D.C. again," Li said, a sound like a sob and a shriek in her voice. "Get up! We have to move now. The Enclave is here but we can still escape through some tunnels in the basement."

The Enclave.

"Right." Nina pulled herself heavily to her feet, checked the chamber of her assault rifle, and gestured for Charon to pick up the rear. "Let's go."

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Nina found herself unusually calm as she and Charon scouted ahead of the group of frightened scientists. The tunnel system beneath the Jefferson Memorial seemed dry, thank goodness. Radiation sickness on top of Enclave soldiers hunting them did not sound like a good idea. Water might also mean mirelurks; one of her least favorite Wasteland nasties.

A hiss off to her left. Charon roared a challenge and leapt forward, Nina not far behind. A couple of feral ghouls fell quickly beneath their combined shower of bullets.

"I suppose if ferals are the worst we encounter down here, we'll be lucky—"

"There they are!" A mechanized shout made Nina turn, gun ready. At the far end of the tunnel stood four Enclave soldiers, their black armor glinting. As usual, Charon charged wildly ahead, heedless of the fact that he was outnumbered. Nina took advantage of the momentary distraction her companion caused to unclip her scoped .44 Magnum. From discretely studying the Brotherhood of Steel knights at the Galaxy News Radio station, she had realized that their armor had weaknesses in the joints, particularly where the arms joined the shoulder and at the neck and this Enclave armor looked similar. Taking a breath to steady her arms, Nina aimed through her scope and fired. The Enclave soldier she had targeted staggered but didn't fall. She didn't waste another breath to curse but fired again; this time the armored soldier fell back, blood pooling rapidly beneath his body. She didn't have time to relish the fierce rush of pain and triumph at his fall before the other soldiers zeroed in on her position and ran forward, their plasma rifles firing.

Charon made short work of two of them, and Nina whirled to find another Enclave soldier nearly on top of her, hands grasping. Nina ducked under his reach and stuck her shotgun in the armpit joint of his armor and fired. He staggered back with a scream. She fired again and the Enclave soldier fell, blood splashing up to her face. Staring at the armored figure, like the one who had stood beside her father and threatened to kill him over stupid water, she felt something dark uncoil inside her, something that promised to stop the pain that was even now shredding her heart into tiny pieces…

Charon shook her arm. "You shouldn't waste your ammo on that one. He's dead."

Nina looked up, startled, and realized she was breathing hard and the barrel of her shotgun was hot to the touch. She looked back down at the soldier, realizing with surprise that she had unloaded a full clip of her combat shotgun into the Enclave soldier's body.

"Let's go get Dr. Li and the others," she said after a moment, her voice hoarse. Why was her face wet? Perhaps this sewer wasn't as dry as she first thought.

It wasn't until later in the tunnels as they finally reached the entrance nearest to the Citadel, that she realized her mission had been changed from finding her father to avenging him.

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Author's note: Another random one-shot. Honestly, I wish that the main quest with Dad could have been drawn out more--I wanted my character to spend more time with him, have him as one of the companions maybe, but with this scene in the game came the idea for this fic.


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